Installing Knative

Knative depends on an Ingress/Gateway which is capable of routing requests to
Knative Services.

Currently, three options exist which provide this functionality:
Ambassador, an Envoy-based API Gateway,
Gloo, an Envoy-based API Gateway, and
Istio, an Envoy-based Service Mesh.

Installing Knative with Ambassador

Installing with Ambassador gives us an
alternative to installing a service mesh for routing to applications with the
Knative Serving component. Note that Istio is required for the Knative Eventing
component.

Installing Knative with Gloo

Install with Gloo: Gloo functions as a lightweight gateway for Knative. Choose this option if you don’t require a service mesh in your cluster and want a lightweight alternative to Istio. Gloo supports all documented Knative features, as well as extensions to Serving such as Eventing and Monitoring.

Installing Knative with Istio

Istio is a popular service mesh that includes a Knative-compatible ingress.
Choose this option if you wish to use Istio service mesh features.

There are several options when installing Knative:

Comprehensive install – Comes with the default versions of all Knative
components as well as a set of observability plugins. Quickest option for
setup.

Limited install – Installs a subset of Knative components.

Custom install – Takes longer, but allows you to choose exactly which
components and oberservability plugins to install.

For new users, we recommend the comprehensive install to get you up and running
quickly.

Install guides

Follow these step-by-step guides for setting up Kubernetes and installing
Knative components.

Comprehensive install guides

The guides below show you how to create a Kubernetes cluster with the right
specs for Knative on your platform of choice, then walk through installing all
available Knative components and a set of observability plugins.

Note: If need to set up a Kubernetes cluster with the correct
specifications to run Knative, you can follow any of the install instructions
through the creation of the cluster, then follow the
Performing a Custom Knative Installation guide.

Observability install guide

Follow this guide to install and set up the available observability plugins on a
Knative cluster.

Configuring Knative Serving

After your Knative installation is running, you can set up a custom domain with
a static IP address to be able to use Knative for publicly available services
and set up an Istio IP range for outbound network access: